Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

What is code, and can it be thought of like a magic spell? Are we building a world so complex that we will lose the ability to understand its operations -- and has that already happened? What does any of this have to do with SimCity, or knowledge that already exists but no one has put together, or how coding will evolve in the near future? Join Eagleman with scientist Sam Arbesman, who has just written a book asking the question: what is code, really?

What is intelligence? If we look hard, can we find it in unexpected places: not just in brains but in all kinds of structures? How should we recognize it? And what does any of this have to do with a bipedal dog born without front legs, or making small new organisms out of single cells, or how Wikipedia might be like an axolotl, or why we are so blind to the vast variety of minds that might surround us? Join Eagleman with guest Michael Levin, professor at Tufts, about how we might discover intelligence all around us in ways we don't typically intuit.

Can we explain consciousness as emerging from classical neuroscience, or do we require deeper principles? Could quantum physics have something to do with it? Is it possible that consciousness predates biology, and biology evolved to take advantage of it? What are the right ways to build new theories in neuroscience when we don’t know the answers? Join Eagleman with Nobel laureate Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to explore the controversial idea that there could be, even possibly, any connection between quantum theory and our awareness of the world.

Brains bear thoughts like a peach tree bears peaches. Even for meditators it's almost impossible to stop the firehose of words and images and ideas. But what in the world is a thought, physically? How can you hear a voice in your head when there's no one speaking in the outside world? And what does any of this have to do with a small marine animal who eats its own brain? Join Eagleman for this week's deep dive into our inner life.

Is your brain a one-person show or an ensemble cast of rivaling neural networks? How do we manage the conflict between different drives, and what does this have to do with literature, deities, maturation, and what Nietzsche meant when he said “every drive wants to be master, and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit”? Join me this week with Jordan Peterson as we examine the way lives are built on conflicting wants.

Is it possible to become happier? How much of your happiness has to do with genetics, social connection, comparison to other people, your balance of optimism vs pessimism, and whether it would be useful to keep a journal of your life? Join Eagleman this week with Bruce Hood, experimental psychologist and author of “The Science of Happiness”.

How do brains slip so easily from the real world into made up worlds? What do authors of great literature have in common with stage magicians and comedians? What does any of this have to do with cognitive shortcuts, prediction machines, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, or why jokes are always structured in threes? Join Eagleman this week for a conversation with his Stanford colleague Joshua Landy as they discuss brains on story.

Why do movies work so well? What does film reveal about the way the brain processes reality? What does any of this have to do with omniscience, simulation, jumping around in time, or why dogs don’t do story? Join Eagleman with guest Jeffrey Zacks, cognitive scientist at Wash U, as we dive into the peculiar magic that happens when the lights go down, the screen glows to life, and we find ourselves pulled into the world of a film.

Is AI an intelligent agent, or is there a different way we should be thinking about it? Is it more like a piece of cultural technology? What in the world is a piece of cultural technology -- and how would re-thinking this change our next steps? What does any of this have to do with the myth of the Golem, printing presses, Socrates, Martin Luther, or the story of stone soup? Join Eagleman this week with cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik for a new take on a new tech.

If you had to give a detailed description of what flits through your mind, how good would you be at it? Might you be surprised at how many of your thoughts don't involve language? Are your thoughts changed by paying attention to them? What does this have to do with getting surprised by a random beep and immediately writing down what you’re thinking? Join Eagleman this week in conversation with Russell Hurlburt, a clinical psychologist who developed a new method to probe inner life.

What would it take to get inside someone else's head, and could new brain technologies ever help us get there? Will there be dream celebrities, in which uploads go viral? What does consciousness feel like from the inside, and why do movies always get this wrong? Why don't you see your own blinks? What would it be like if exactly 1/2 of your brain was numbed to sleep? And what would it be like to become a horse?

What does it mean to stand in another’s shoes—and when are the gaps between us too wide to cross? This week, Eagleman explores bats, kicked robots, Helen Keller, empathy, storytelling, and the phrase “I know exactly how you feel.” We'll weave through neuroscience, philosophy, literature, and technology to ask: Can we ever truly understand another’s inner world?

What enables some people to keep going when everything falls apart? We all know someone who’s been through hell and comes out standing. This episode is about resilience. Join Eagleman with guest Dr. Jonathan Downar to discover what happens in the brain when we face adversity. Is resilience something you’re born with, or is it something your brain can develop? What does any of this have to do with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, using magnetic fields to zap the brain, the less famous partner to the reward system, or what seemingly unrelated disorders in psychiatry all have in common?

What does The Matrix tell us about the brain and time perception? And what does that have to do with champion bicyclists, hidden data, elementary particles, secret murderers, or time machines? Today’s episode is about slow motion: what’s going on in the brain, and why we are so mesmerized by it. Whether watching a sword battle, basketball dunk, or sprinters, we're pulled to slow motion like moths to flame... but have you ever wondered from a neuroscience perspective what that’s all about? Me too, and hence today’s 100th weekiversary episode.

Your brain occasionally cooks up falsehoods that you believe entirely, but why does this confabulation happen, and how frequently? What does this tell us about memory, truth-telling, and your life as a story that drifts? And what does this have to do with a paralyzed Supreme Court judge, a blind person who insists she can see, whether Nelson Mandela did or did not die in the 1980s, or whether Curious George had a tail?

How many people are having relationships with artificial neural networks? Should we think of AI lovers as traps, mirrors, or sandboxes? Is there a clear line between relationship bots and therapist bots? And what does this have to do with Eliza Doolittle, a doll cabinet in your head, loneliness epidemics, or suicide mitigation? Join Eagleman with guest researcher Bethanie Maples to discover where we are and where we're going.

You're defined in part by the genome you arrive with -- so what does it mean when you can edit it? What does this have to do with viruses, copy-pasting, and whether we will modify the story of our own species? Join Eagleman with guest Trevor Martin, CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, for this week's episode about the remarkable situation we find ourselves in, now that we know how to read and write our biological inheritance.

Now that we’re careening into our AI future, what are the most important things for our students to learn? Do we keep teaching as we always have, do we drop our heads on the desk, or are there clever ways to steer and optimize education? What would Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, say about all this? Find out in this week's episode.

How can we rethink schools to meet the future? What does this have to do with the invention of the printing press, the prevalence of desk calculators, or the spread of Google? And how is this connected to the writer Goethe, a digital replica of the philosopher Aristotle, or the two lasting bequests that we should give our children? Join Eagleman this week for surprises about what AI means for the next generation.

Do you perceive red the same way I do? What is wrong with the textbook model of vision? Why do brains have so many internal feedback loops? And what does any of this have to do with Plato’s cave, Ernest Hemingway, or artificial neural networks that perceive dogs everywhere? Join Eagleman with guest Anil Seth, author of “Being You”, to explore the scientific problem of consciousness.